According to the NSSE website, reliability refers to the consistency or stability of measurement. There are three different types of reliability measures that the NSSE uses. The measures of reliability are listed below.
Internal Consistency - "Do the items within a scale correlate well with each other?"
Temporal Stability - "How stable are the results for institutions and students upon repeated administrations?"
Equivalence - "Do results correlate well with those of a similar measure on the same population?"
Validity
In a general sense, validity is the degree to which a test measures what it is intended to measure. According to Messick (1989) it is “the degree to which evidence and theory support the interpretations of test scores entailed by the proposed uses of tests.” So validity is about the inferences we make from the evidence, and not a property of the instrument itself.
NSSE uses seven different forms of validity. The seven are as follows:
Response Process Validity - "Do respondents understand the questions to mean what we intend them to mean?
Content Validity - "Do the survey questions cover all possible facets of the scale or construct?"
Construct Validity - "How well does this group of items measure the theoretical concept?"
Concurrent Validity - "Do the questions measure the construct in the same way that others have measured it?"
Predictive Validity - "Does the scale correlate in predicted ways with outcome measures or other forms of engagement?"
Known Groups Validity - "Do the results of various subgroups match those from other studies?"
Consequential Validity - "Are the survey results interpreted and used in ways that improve undergraduate learning?"
Cost of Instrument
The cost to administer the survey is $300. This is a nonrefundable Registration Fee and a Standard NSSE Administration Fee based on the institution's total undergraduate enrollment. There are other fees that administering the survey could acquire, some of these are optional but some of these are fees that administering the survey acquires. Some of these fees are: Topical Modules, Consortium Participation, Oversampling, Student Portal/Learning Management System Survey Links. There could also be supplemental fees and withdrawal fees.
Below is a graphic that shows the cost of administering the NSSE.
NSSE Fees
Registration fee: $300
Undergraduate Enrollment
Sample Size by Recruitment Method
Email
Regular Mail
Administration Fee
Fewer than 500*
All first-year
&
senior students
(up to 25,000 total)
&
senior students
(up to 25,000 total)